The more fleshed out look at one of the most anticipated movies of the year is stirring, epic and intimate all at the same time. The black and whiteRoma, which festival insiders have been buzzing about, is Cuaron’s first movie since 2014 multi-Oscar winner and box office smashGravity. It debuts at Venice.

The film chronicles a turbulent year in the lives of a middle-class family in 1970s Mexico City. According to the production, Cuarón’s most personal film to date was “inspired by the women from his childhood and the matriarchy that shaped his world.”

According to the film’s official synopsis it “follows a young domestic worker Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio) from Mixteco heritage descent and her co-worker Adela (Nancy García), also Mixteca, who work for a small family in the middle-class neighborhood of Roma. Mother of four, Sofia (Marina de Tavira) copes with the extended absence of her husband, and Cleo faces her own devastating news that threatens to distract her from caring for Sofia’s children, whom she loves as her own. While trying to construct a new sense of love and solidarity in a context of a social hierarchy where class and race are perversely intertwined, Cleo and Sofia quietly wrestle with changes infiltrating the family home in a country facing confrontation between a government-backed militia and student demonstrators.”